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ursulaVarious people have told me that they approve of random character death in literature-- the phenomenon in which a character who might have survived and whose death is not foreshadowed is suddenly hit by a stray bullet or a wandering bus-- because people die randomly in real life, often, and so it makes the story seem more realistic. My response to random character death is completely opposite: when a character dies for no apparent reason, I am thrown out of the story. It seems less realistic, not more. One could draw the conclusion that I simply have a more optimistic worldview; but I'm not convinced that that's true, and in any case I want to discuss more literary questions.
Genre
In certain types of adventure story, the hero has a near-death encounter, if not at the end of every chapter, certainly at the end of every novel. In this sort of story, random death is not acceptable: if the hero and the villain could survive being thrown off a cliff, then if the hero's best friend is knocked off the same high cliff by a gust of wind, I will not believe she is dead. I will skim the remaining pages to see if she comes back, and if she isn't in the epilogue, I'll expect her in the sequel. The problem is that if the book's universe admits that people can be killed by forces as weak as gusts of wind, the hero should not have survived the first three chapters. The random death highlights the fact that the author's whim, not necessity or even internal consistency, drives the plot.
Grieving
In real life, when someone dies randomly, everyone is shocked. The best friend, girlfriend, or parent of the deceased mourns; but so do his other friends, his acquaintances, teachers, co-workers, and so forth. Newspapers write editorials. Schools offer counseling to the entire student body. In particular, anyone who actually observes the death will be significantly affected, and will probably take months to recover. In literature, the same thing must happen. Characters must grieve. Furthermore, mourning must not be confined to the viewpoint character. A quick tour of denial-anger-grief-acceptance is not enough, especially when it is accomplished in a chapter or less, after which we return to the main plot. Not only will the hero be angry, so will all his friends. They won't be able to offer wise advice on the mutability of all things, because they'll be too busy locking themselves in bathrooms and crying because they didn't know the deceased as well as they would have liked, and now it's too late.
Getting Random Death Right
Of course, characters can be hit by buses or stray bullets in literature. However, the writer must establish a universe in which people die for no good reason. For instance, in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy the destruction of the Earth is amply foreshadowed by the destruction of Arthur's house. Connie Willis' Passage is slightly less obvious: it's a book about near-death experiences, of course, but the thematically important points are that the Titanic got hit by an iceberg, that a little kid with a likely-terminal illness is obsessed by the Titanic, and that the emergency room is a very dangerous place. Moreover, after the senseless character death, the remaining characters react: they try in vain to save her, they go to her funeral and rage at the speaker for misinterpreting the victim's life, and though they do try to find some sort of meaning in her death, they're endlessly frustrated with the easy answers.
Genre
In certain types of adventure story, the hero has a near-death encounter, if not at the end of every chapter, certainly at the end of every novel. In this sort of story, random death is not acceptable: if the hero and the villain could survive being thrown off a cliff, then if the hero's best friend is knocked off the same high cliff by a gust of wind, I will not believe she is dead. I will skim the remaining pages to see if she comes back, and if she isn't in the epilogue, I'll expect her in the sequel. The problem is that if the book's universe admits that people can be killed by forces as weak as gusts of wind, the hero should not have survived the first three chapters. The random death highlights the fact that the author's whim, not necessity or even internal consistency, drives the plot.
Grieving
In real life, when someone dies randomly, everyone is shocked. The best friend, girlfriend, or parent of the deceased mourns; but so do his other friends, his acquaintances, teachers, co-workers, and so forth. Newspapers write editorials. Schools offer counseling to the entire student body. In particular, anyone who actually observes the death will be significantly affected, and will probably take months to recover. In literature, the same thing must happen. Characters must grieve. Furthermore, mourning must not be confined to the viewpoint character. A quick tour of denial-anger-grief-acceptance is not enough, especially when it is accomplished in a chapter or less, after which we return to the main plot. Not only will the hero be angry, so will all his friends. They won't be able to offer wise advice on the mutability of all things, because they'll be too busy locking themselves in bathrooms and crying because they didn't know the deceased as well as they would have liked, and now it's too late.
Getting Random Death Right
Of course, characters can be hit by buses or stray bullets in literature. However, the writer must establish a universe in which people die for no good reason. For instance, in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy the destruction of the Earth is amply foreshadowed by the destruction of Arthur's house. Connie Willis' Passage is slightly less obvious: it's a book about near-death experiences, of course, but the thematically important points are that the Titanic got hit by an iceberg, that a little kid with a likely-terminal illness is obsessed by the Titanic, and that the emergency room is a very dangerous place. Moreover, after the senseless character death, the remaining characters react: they try in vain to save her, they go to her funeral and rage at the speaker for misinterpreting the victim's life, and though they do try to find some sort of meaning in her death, they're endlessly frustrated with the easy answers.
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(no subject)
Date: 2004-02-04 10:28 pm (UTC)Icarus
Re:
Date: 2004-02-04 10:55 pm (UTC)Re:
Date: 2004-02-04 11:06 pm (UTC)Icarus
(no subject)
Date: 2004-02-04 11:36 pm (UTC)I would conclude not that you have a fundamentally more optimistic worldview (though that may be the case), but rather that you place more value on a carefully constructed, false story. I prefer my stories to be more real. I don't enjoy stories about the pretty princess in the tower coming down and saving the life of the poor village boy from the lion even through she's never held a sword before. Even universes with magic, or other reality altering devices, have to be internally consisent to not raise my ire.
I suppose that my point is that I value a story more when it is constructed within a framework that closely mirrors reality, or is a logical extension of it. The more a story strays from this, the more fundamentaly false it becomes, and the less I enjoy it.
Even with characters I like, it gets grating when they barely survive yet again for the twentieth time.
Re:
Date: 2004-02-04 11:37 pm (UTC)Re:
Date: 2004-02-05 06:14 am (UTC)A carefully constructed story can create a more 'real' reality than one that kills people randomly or dips constantly into 'grittiness'. I'm not condoning flat-out pulp. But think about stories like The Last Unicorn, where a clearly fantastic reality does convey ideas poignant to our own lives.
You can't create vivid storytelling merely by fighting against common unrealities. If a writer is too strongly motivated by wanting to appear 'real' it will affect the work, like toolmarks showing, much the same as a writer who uses unreality as an excuse to violate consistancy and causality.
So, really, I think you are both arguing the same point from different perspectives. Stories make promises, implicit in the way the world and characters are introduced. Violate those promises, and the reading becomes unsatisfactory.
Re:
Date: 2004-02-05 09:45 am (UTC)Re:
Date: 2004-02-05 09:53 am (UTC)Re:
Date: 2004-02-05 10:21 am (UTC)Minor example, but I was talking with a writer who had set a story in Cleveland, and he had invented a setting whole cloth downtown, but people who read the book said they recognized it, or claimed to have been there, when, in fact, nothing like it really exists. But it captured the feeling, in general, of Cleveland's bleak lakeside. If he had instead set the scene on the real Cleveland lakefront, it would have been missing a few details that round out not the reality of a scene, but the feeling and characterization of a place.
That's sort of what I mean by being 'more real than reality'.
Though, you are right, I'm arguing tangentally to Brian's well-documented dislike for the gross machinations of your standard pulp plot. Heck, I think we all know dreck when we read it. Just some of us can turn our minds off and enjoy the dreckiness of it. :)
imaginary buildings
Date: 2004-02-05 02:01 pm (UTC)heh, he's good ;)
Re:
Date: 2004-02-05 02:10 pm (UTC)but when you think about it, real people survive by hairs all the time. i can think of at least ten semi-dramatic near misses on my life and i am only 22. maybe three of those would be workable into a story.
and the best heroes are often ordinary people who manage to do extraordinary things... i mean, which would you rather? superman who is immortal and unstoppable? or the village healer who manages to get a lucky hit in with the sword and actually has a chance of being killed but overcomes those odds?
but i think my real point is, real life is horrifying. people die for no good reason and leave huge amounts of pain in their wake. who wants to read that over and over? like in the midshipman books... people die a ton and they are so depressing i could only read about 3 and a half of the series. and developing characters is difficult. one of the ways to do this is to stick them in tough situations and watch how they survive. if you kill them, well, so much for all the work you put into that. so the death has to have some meaning for someone or what was the point?
so really, i agree with ursula. there should never be such a thing as a "meaningless" death in fiction. there has to be some sort of real reaction and some kind of purpose to it.
Re:
Date: 2004-02-07 11:47 pm (UTC)Ooh, good point. I nearly burned to death in my bed when I was little. My night light set one of my favorite stuffed toys on fire. It was very traumatic. (The death of my stuffed toy I mean, not my own near miss.)
who wants to read that over and over?
Long live unreality!
...I still think learning made up languages is silly though. *runs away cackling*
Re:
Date: 2004-02-08 05:19 am (UTC)give me fantasy to reality anytime. without it, i wouldn't want to live in this world.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-26 10:20 pm (UTC)We do, how about that? Like driving and going oh my god I didn't see that car there. I wonder why people tend to forget this fact when questioning characters living in a story.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-26 10:19 pm (UTC)All I can say basically is that I agree. Especially about the greiving part, but not only from other characters in the story. I don't like characters being killed off not because of some abstract payoff from the character that I will then miss out on, but because I knew the character, and most likely liked them. And if they die in the book then they're gone and I'm sad because, well, they died and they're not going to get to live out their character-life and I'm not going to meet them again. If the people in the story grieve this tempers it a little bit, but I'm still less likely to reread the story knowing a character I like dies. And the more characters who die, the less likely I am to reread the book.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-27 05:42 am (UTC)